Mens Mentis
by Helena Lucia
Summary: "Your mind," Silas says terribly softly. "is a very dark and riveting place, Damon." Layers of grey and black and every shade in between. Soft as shadows and twice as elusive. -Spoilers for season four. Vaguely disturbing themes.-


_**Mens Mentis**_

* * *

_**Disclaimer: The Vampire Diaries TV series does not belong to me.  
**_

_**Warnings: Hints of slash, het, incest and vaguely disturbing content.**_

* * *

_ "Your mind," Silas says softly. "is a very dark and riveting place, Damon." Layers of grey and black and every shade in between. Soft as shadows and twice as elusive._

* * *

_ This_ is not what Damon Salvatore wants. He does not want Elena Gilbert, not in the way Stefan believes him to, and he does not want her _love_. He has tasted love, and it _burned_ hotter than the sun, more bitter than vervain.

He could simply leave. Walk away from this town and it's continuous cycle of death, rebirth and madness. But, Damon muses that this version of himself is less likely to abandon his companions. Perhaps '_accomplices_' may be a more appropriate word. Stefan would like that.

Stefan believes that it is Elena, his feelings, and the tangled mess that is the sire bond which keeps Damon in Mystic Falls. It isn't, at least not the manner that Stefan believes. Sire bonds, he knows well, nearly always end in delusion or destruction. Given enough time, just about everything will fall apart.

The trick, Damon thinks, is piecing it back together, like a child's jigsaw puzzle. And if Stefan likes to believe that he and Elena can piece Damon's psyche back together, Damon is more than happy to let him. What Stefan does not understand, is that Damon does not want Elena because she is naive, beautiful, or human. Or rather, because she _was_ human. It was not her resemblance to Katherine Petrova which drew him to her, nor her unfaltering attempts to find a side of him that vampirism hasn't swallowed whole.

* * *

This _obsession_, which his accomplices suppose to be his weakness, is not love. For when Damon loves, he loves wildly, passionately, with a devotion which tears at his mind with it's intensity. Even as a human, and oh how long ago that was, Damon always walked the razor fine line between ardent love and impassioned fury. His and Stefan's poisonous love affair with Katherine was proof of that much.

This, which Damon feels for Elena, is not love. It is hunger. A craving, a need for something stronger than blood. An addiction to the sharp twist of Stefan's mouth when Damon's eyes flicker to Elena. The fine tremor in his hands which Stefan suppresses when Damon wipes Elena's blood from his lips.

And oh how Damon _wants_; wants blood, wants sex, wants Elena, and wants to _devour_ the way Stefan rages and _controls_ himself. Controls himself from lashing out against Damon, and allowing himself to be dragged into the whirlpool of his older brother's own decadent _want_.

There is something in the way that Stefan attempts, and occasionally fails, to repress himself. His feelings, his wants, his cravings, his very _nature_, that makes Damon itch to open up Elena's heart and force Stefan to _drink_ until he drains her dry of all her sweet humanity.

Where this instinct came from, Damon is not certain, though Stefan's guilty reflex is unmistakable. "_It may_", he says once, while Stefan rages at him for the dead boy slumped across the sofa, pale with blood loss, "_simply be a byproduct of the unfortunate circumstances of my vampiric rebirth_." When Stefan's scathing words melt into self-loathing anger, Damon never mentions it aloud again.

* * *

When Damon orders Elena to shut off her humanity, he feels it like a subtle twist in the back of his mind. Stefan's alarm and his own, more subdued reaction to the muted sire bond. Something in him, a malicious ire reminiscent of the weeks after his vampiric awakening, wishes to slice open the shreds of the sire bond and watch Elena lose herself in the resulting aftershocks of his buried insanity. The ensuing delirium, he knows, would kill such a young vampire.

"_Damon-_" Stefan breathes, and Damon hands her the matches instead.

* * *

Stefan talks about the Cure, about _fixing_ Elena and regaining his own humanity. Damon reads Lexi's indoctrination in his words and reflects on the way that Stefan had pressed close to him, whispering softly against Damon's throat, after killing Andie. Damon wonders what they could become, the two Salvatore brothers together, without Stefan's damned _control_.

* * *

The creature before him walks like Stefan, talks like Stefan, but is _wrong_. Damon knows his brother's every temperament better than his own, an this illusion is not he. He wrenches the strands of his psyche around him, layers of shadows and shades of false ideas and fallacious memories.

_"Your mind," _Silas says, terribly softly_. "is a very dark and riveting place, Damon."_

Damon cares little what Silas sees in his mind, full of ambiguous rage and recondite pleasure, or shards of mirrors which vanish when viewed. He barely feels the tear of the stake at his midsection, and does not hear the words which spill from his lips. Elena, he knows, is not what he wanted. It does not matter what Silas sees, only that it is anything but the truth.

* * *

_"How did he get to you?"_ Stefan asks.

_ "Talked about your hair. I thought it had to be you."_ Damon offers glibly, and does not look back at Elena's still form in the cellar. It is not Elena that Damon wants.

* * *

_**Author's Note: I like the L. J. Smith books a lot more than I like the TV series in general, especially concerning Damon's characterisation, but Silas' comment to Damon in "Pictures of You" (S04E19) inspired me to write this.**_


End file.
